Opera dropped Presto after I left. They did that as the management and board were clueless, if you ask me. They did not see the value in having the best browser engine at that time, including the one that would run on the least hardware.
We did have issues with being blocked by some sites, the most important being sites made by Google and Microsoft, so I guess that was their rationale for doing it.
@jon The one thing I miss from old Opera / old web is that you could press the back button in the browser and it worked instantly with no re-rendering. Browser experience has really gone downhill since then but it's likely due to the massive increase in JavaScript usage 😭
We spent a lot of time on the caching mechanism. It did get more difficult with sites that would insist on reloading, mostly to show new ads, but we got it working. We kept ready formatted instances of the pages in memory and we did it in a compact manner.
Our view was always that our code should run on old hardware and on terrible networks. Sadly that is not how other browser cores are built.
That being said, some work has been done on functionality like this in Chromium by some old Opera people now working at Google.
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